In 2017, the invest.com/investing-in-ukraine/business-opportunities/startups/" rel="dofollow">startup Influ2 of Volodymyr Mikhalk and Dmytro Lissitskii attracted $190 thousand exclusively from angel investments. One Way Ventures and VentureFriends, Kazakh investor Murat Abdrakhmanov and former CEO of GlobalLogic, Peter Harrison, have already taken part in the round for $3.4 million in 2020.
In 2020, Influ2 grew in revenue from $1 million to $5 million and reached profitability - from that moment, according to Lissitzkii, the situation changed, and they became interesting to all classic funds from the Valley.
As Dmytro Lisitskii explains, everyone is familiar with the situation when the gym sends SMS with an offer to buy a subscription to existing customers twice a week, for years on end. And he does not send an apsel from what can really still be sold. This is exactly the problem that the startup Influ2 undertook to solve, allowing to target advertising to specific people, instead of "carpet bombing" of little relevance offers to people unknown to the advertiser.
Previously, the startup experienced several pivots in terms of the monetization model and the legal aspect: serving ads to specific people without their explicit consent, apparently, required measures to comply with the GDPR and other regulations on the protection of personal data.
